• Choose a text with peppy dialogue, a little action, humor or drama, lively narration, and several parts.
• Make copies of the story (1 to 3 pages of the story may be enough).
• Highlight spoken parts in different colors.
• Highlight narrator parts in another color.
• Assign parts, practice, and perform.
Aaron Shepard’s Steps for Group Scripting
• Read through the story silently.
• As a group, identify the roles in the story and divide them among you.
• Go over the story together, deciding who will read what and also what to cut. On your own sheet, in pencil, cross out the cuts and underline your own speeches. [They don’t need to mark the speeches of others—but if they want to anyway, they can put a circled name, initial, or number above where each reader will start.]
• Try out your script by reading together. Go back and change it as needed.
• In fifteen or twenty minutes, each group will have a script and can read to the others!
Aaron Shepard’s Steps for Group Scripting